Gartner releases first Magic Quadrant on mobile marketing platforms

A key question about mobile marketing is whether marketers should employ platforms specifically designed for those devices or utilize mobile capabilities within larger, multichannel marketing clouds.

Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant report on mobile marketing platforms points out the depth of mobile capabilities in mobile-only offerings, plus it notes the flexibility for a marketer who doesn’t necessarily want to make such a large commitment to one vendor. (A complimentary copy of the report is available from one of the selected vendors, Braze. Registration required.)

On the other hand, although mobile-only vendors are beginning to add other channels like email and Internet of Things, the large marketing clouds offer built-in integration of mobile campaigns and data with all the other channels.

In assessing 15 vendors, Gartner places five mobile-only platforms into the top category of Leaders (Braze, Urban Airship, Swrve, Localytics and Leanplum) and only one marketing cloud (IBM).

The Challengers — strong on execution, less strong on vision — contains four mobile-onlys: Vibes, Pyze, FollowAnalytics and SessionM. Visionaries — strong on vision, less so on execution — contains only the Oracle marketing cloud.

In the bottom group of Niche Players are MoEngage, IMImobile, the customer engagement platform Sailthru and, interestingly, Salesforce.

Leaders, large clouds

Among the Leaders, the report advises that B2C marketers might consider Braze, formerly known as Appboy, for its complete customer life cycle with real-time personalization and data exchange with a wide range of partners. But Gartner dinged Braze platform for its lack of mobile website analytics.

IBM is extending its famed Watson AI engine to its mobile marketing, and it offers value for existing IBM customers, although the report points to the cloud’s lack of native mobile wallet support.

Leanplum provides a visual campaign creator and is planning to support voice-driven interfaces through connected home devices and in-vehicle systems, pointing to a major broadening of its scope.

Localytics’ app analytics core guides its capabilities, and it allows users to query raw data without exporting it to other tools. The company is looking to add more AI-driven capabilities, deep linking support, GDPR compliance and a new marketing workflow engine.

As for the other two large marketing clouds, the report cautions that Oracle’s mobile capabilities are “dispersed across multiple solutions,” with overlapping capabilities like separate content management systems in Responsys and Maxymiser. It also noted user interface complexity as a challenge with the platform.

Salesforce is similarly hampered by offering a mobile component within its overall solution, the report says, because non-Salesforce customer can’t easily utilize mobile tools without signing up for other cloud components for such tasks as multivariate testing.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.